Privacy

Last year, a child protection worker was assigned a case where a mother was deemed a high risk to her baby’s safety. It’s the worker’s job to protect the child and, if necessary, separate the mother from her kid. Read More >>

In a dusty plastic bin under my bed lies at least four laptops, six cellphones, and a half-dozen hard drives. I have no idea what’s on any of them. Most of these devices predate the cloud-storage era, and so likely contain solitary copies of photos, texts, and emails, among other confidential files (porn?) that I’d probably be horrified to learn had fallen into the hands of strangers. Read More >>

Facebook is under criminal investigation for massive data deals between the social media giant and many of the world’s biggest technology firms, according to a Wednesday evening report on the New York Times. Read More >>

The disastrous plan to implement a nationwide system blocking web users from viewing pornography unless their age and identities are confirmed by a verification service – an astonishingly ill-conceived plan being spearheaded by doddering Brexiteer Theresa May’s Tory government – is nearly a year behind schedule. But the clock is ticking, the Independent reported on Monday. Read More >>

A white hat hacker discovered an unsecured database on Saturday listing the personal information of nearly 2 million women in China, which included a section titled, for some reason, “BreedReady.” The database was taken down as of Monday, but its existence still indicates that someone is collecting a wealth of deeply intimate information for hundreds of thousands of women. Read More >>

The New York City Police Department has developed a pattern-recognition tool called Patternizr to sort through mountains of files related to “hundreds of thousands of crimes logged in the NYPD’s database,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday. Read More >>

As Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy parade carries on, a researcher has revealed his findings of a since-patched Facebook vulnerability in Messenger that could potentially expose information about who users had been communicating with. Read More >>

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has acknowledged it made a major mistake when it bought Italian blockchain analytics firm Neutrino, whose senior management staff included several members of infamous Italian firm Hacking Team—which has reportedly sold powerful hacking and surveillance tools to oppressive governments. Read More >>

The National Security Agency has “quietly shut down” the mass surveillance programme it implemented after the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks to analyse metadata on domestic US calls and text messages, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing an episode of the Lawfare podcast with “senior Republican congressional aide” Luke Murry. The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Murry stated the programme has not been used in at least six months, with both papers writing that it is unclear whether Donald Trump’s administration will ask Congress to renew its legal authority when relevant portions of the Patriot Act expire at the end of 2019. Read More >>

Following the discovery of a bug that showed hundreds of Google accounts as being linked to unrelated individual users, Google has temporarily shut down Photos on Android TV. The mysterious software flaw demonstrated potential privacy concerns, and the company said a fix is in the works. Read More >>

Google’s bug-zapping Project Zero team has uncovered what it said was a “high-severity” flaw in the macOS kernel, Wired reported on Monday, and revealed the details on March 1st following the expiration of a 90-day period for Apple to patch the exploit. Read More >>

For too many people, moving the digits around in some variation of Football69Lover is their idea of a strong password. So you might expect something complicated like” “ji32k7au4a83” would be a great password. But according to the data breach repository Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), it shows up more often than one might expect. Read More >>

Over the weekend, Facebook users were freaked out to learn that the social network allows “Everyone” to look them up with the phone number they provided for two-factor authentication (2FA) by default. This sneaky ad-targeting method disguised as a privacy tool really has no privacy benefits, but there’s still a way to protect yourself. Read More >>

China’s dystopian “social credit” system—which penalises citizens found to have engaged in some type of misconduct by imposing a number of restrictions on their activities—has already resulted in tens of millions of rejected attempts to purchase plane or train tickets, the Guardian reported on Friday. Read More >>